Konrad Steffen: The Global Warming Prophet

CANARY ON THE ICE CAP
In the annals of polar science, Konrad Steffen will go down as one of the legends. Koni, as he is known by his friends and colleagues, oversees an annual budget of $50 million and a staff of 550 at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) in Boulder, Colorado, a research center that is jointly funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and agencies like NASA. But Steffen has had the most influence not as an administrator but as an icy-boots explorer. He has spent the past 32 summers in the high Arctic, working in Alaska and Canada before settling on Greenland, where his Greenland Climate Network serves as the eyes and ears for climate scientists worldwide. In this extreme environment, the on-the-ground reality was invisible until Steffen personally customized and deployed much of the instrumentation that tells the scientific world, hour by hour and year by year, the conditions on the Greenland ice sheet and how they're changing.

The news isn't heartening. In fact, new data that Steffen and his colleagues are just beginning to truly understand suggest that the seemingly dire warnings in the recent reports from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) may turn out to be profoundly understated.

Climatologists have found that the best places to study global warming are the coldest regions on Earth. The Arctic, the Antarctic and the world's highest mountains respond to temperature changes more rapidly and dramatically than anywhere else on the planet. Greenland, especially, has become a kind of barometer for the rest of the world because of its sensitivity to climate changes and because its ice sheet-which Steffen calls "the weather machine of Europe"-exerts a tremendous influence on many of the Northern Hemisphere's ecological cycles. Meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet is the largest potential contributor to sea-level rise, so what happens in Greenland over the next decade will answer key questions about how the rest of the Earth will fare in the next century.

This year, researchers from some 60 nations are participating in the International Polar Year, an intensive burst of interdisciplinary research focusing on the polar regions. Thus far, the data the researchers have seen-much of which was harvested from Steffen's Greenland Climate Network-has been alarming. Water from the melting ice sheet is gushing into the North Atlantic much faster than scientists had previously thought possible. The upshot of the news out of Swiss Camp is that sea levels may rise much higher and much sooner than even the most pessimistic climate forecasts predicted.

THE PILGRIMAGE TO SWISS CAMP
Koni Steffen doesn't look like a worried man when I catch up with him on a mid-April afternoon at the airport in Albany, New York, the layover in his annual pilgrimage from Boulder to Greenland. Steffen is tall and wiry, with stringy brown hair and a graying beard. He has intense, grayish-blue eyes and the furrowed, leathery cheeks you might expect of a man who has spent more than half of his 55 summers squinting into a bitter wind. In his speech, I can hear the lilting inflections of Schweizterdeutsch (Swiss German), the "secret language" he speaks at home with his wife and two children.

The three duffels Steffen tosses into my Jeep don't hint at the 82 cargo boxes he has shipped ahead, after two all-night packing binges. The next morning-at 4:30 a.m., to be precise-Steffen, his crates and his three graduate students will board a C-130 at the Air National Guard base in Schenectady. The plane, which is outfitted with retractable skis, will make a long, slow flight to Kangerlussuaq, on Greenland's west coast.